“And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”

In the 1920s, Alice Van Leer Carrick, the pioneering authority on American silhouettes, came upon an album kept by William Bache (1771–1845) as a record of his work and expressed her delight in “turning the pages of this century-old treasure-trove of nearly two thousand shadow portraits.”

There she found images of Chancellor George Wythe, President Thomas Jefferson, and Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, as well as “hundreds of other profiles of everyday people, less well-known, but equally well cut; all of them vivid and interesting.”